Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Accessories After The Fact

I have always been more of a baseball and basketball fan than a football fan. Even so, I still follow football pretty closely, playing fantasy and all that jazz. Much ink has been spilled, and electrons spent, on the series of vicious hits dealt out this weekend during the NFL games.

Two of the more devastating were the ones on Eagle DeSean Jackson and Raven Todd Heap, as shown here:

The Jackson hit:

The Heap hit:


The argument seems to go in a circle-it's a game predicated on violence, that at the same time punishes its employees when they exert TOO MUCH violence. With the speed and skill of today's athletes, it seems impossible to ask a player like Meriwether or Robinson to notice, within fractions of a second, that the pass that was thrown is no longer playable, and thus they must pull back and not exert themselves. And at the same time, if Jackson or Heap catches the ball, it seems that almost any violence is acceptable, since, of course, any other action endangers the team's chances of winning.

I don't know how to solve this-how do you legislate split second decisions like this? And how do you support a sport, a for profit enterprise, which thrives on the systematic crippling of its employees?

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